A New Cold War Mystery: What Are the Soviets Shipping to Cuba?

Thirty-fifth Chapter in a Series Chronicling the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962

ANADYR Begins

Fifty years ago this mid-July, the Soviet freighter Maria Ulyanova sailed from the Soviet Union for Cuba. Though no one in the West knew it, Maria Ulyanova was the first of 85 ships carrying the military personnel and weapons that would turn Cuba into a strategic Soviet missile base.

The second phase of Operation ANADYR had begun.

Running the Gauntlet of Choke Points

Western observers quickly noticed the extraordinary increase in Soviet shipping bound for Cuba. That was easy.

To reach the Atlantic, all ANADYR ships had to sail through narrow straits patrolled by Western reconnaissance units throughout the Cold War. These “choke points” were an invaluable means of keeping track of Soviet ships leaving or returning to Soviet ports.

Whatever port they sailed from—in the Black Sea, in the Baltic, or from Murmansk—ANADYR ships would be shadowed and photographed by NATO reconnaissance aircraft throughout their long, long voyage to Cuba—to the Kremlin’s intense annoyance.

The high-flying U-2 played no part in this reconnaissance. Almost all of it was conducted by low-flying aircraft operating from a chain of bases ringing the Atlantic.

Seeing Inside ANADYR’s Ships

The challenge for the U.S. Intelligence Community wasn’t spotting ANADYR ships: they stuck out like sore thumbs. The analysts’ challenge was figuring out what they were carrying.

Photographic Intelligence

Photographs taken by reconnaissance aircraft provided a clue. The upper photo of the Poltava, taken by an aircraft flying level with her mast head, shows Poltava riding very high in the water. That broad stripe of exposed bottom paint was a dead give-away, according to Dino Brugioni, that Poltava was carrying military equipment, which is “of low weight but large in volume.”  That description fits almost all military cargo, however, from battlefield tanks to ballistic missiles.

Brugioni also describes Poltava as “a large-hatch” ship equipped with “a sixty-ton boom adjacent to the large hatch” for loading and unloading lumber. If Poltava and her sister large-hatch ships could handle lumber, they could also handle missiles. But was she carrying missiles, or some other military cargo?

The lower photo, taken by a reconnaissance aircraft flying almost directly overhead, shows what Brugioni describes as “seventeen cargo trucks, none associated with missiles.” But did that innocent-appearing deck cargo mean that the hold’s contents were also innocent?

As we saw in the 32nd chapter in this series (), the Soviet military deliberately placed non-military or disguised military cargo on ANADYR ships’ decks to mislead Western observers about the rest of their cargoes.

How to Be Sure?

In sum: fifty years ago the U.S. intelligence community was pretty sure many of the Soviet-Bloc ships plowing toward Cuba were carrying military cargo. Some of them could carry missiles.

The only way for Western observers to tell for sure what those ships were carrying would be to watch as they disgorged their cargoes in port—but Western observers weren’t allowed in Castro’s police state.

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Sources and Notes

The first phase of ANADYR was staging: transporting the Soviet personnel and equipment that would establish strategic missile bases in Cuba to one of the eight embarkation ports on the Black Sea, the Baltic, and in the Soviet Arctic. The second phase that began with the sailing of the Maria Ulyanova was transporting these assets to Cuba.

The first ANADYR ships to sail are described in a number of sources, among them:

• Lawrence Chang and Peter Kornbluh, eds., The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962: A National Security Archive Document Reader. New York: The New Press, 1998, 364. Some of these ships’ manifests reported false cargoes and destinations;
• Norman Polmar and John D. Gresham, DEFCON-2: Standing on the Brink of Nuclear War during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2006, 61;
• Generals Anatoli I. Gribkov and William Y. Smith, Operation ANADYR: U.S. and Soviet Generals Recount the Cuban Missile Crisis. Chicago: edition q, inc., 1994, 29. Gribkov’s detail about the number of ships and round trips appears also on 29; and
• James G. Blight, Bruce J. Allyn, and David A. Welch, Cuba on the Brink: Castro, the Missile Crisis, and the Soviet Collapse. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002.

The Soviet freighter Maria Uyanova was named after Vladimir Lenin’s mother.

Dino Brugioni’s analysis of Poltava appears in his Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of The Cuban Missile Crisis (Robert F. McCort, ed.). New York: Random House, 1991, at 149. The photograph of Poltava comes from the Dino A. Brugioni Collection, National Security Archive, Washington, D.C. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nsa/cuba_mis_cri/photos.htm